Wake On LAN in Linux with gWakeOnLan or etherwake

Wake on LAN (WOL) is networking standard that allows a computer to be turned on or woken up by a network message.

The first thing is to enable WOL on the devices you want to wake up. In PCs, this can be configured either directly in the BIOS by enabling “Remote Wake Up”, either by modifying your network card settings.

Here are 2 tools that have implemented this standard under Linux:

gWakeOnLan: This GTK+ utility scans the MAC address on the LAN to detect available devices, you can then select to remotely start the device of your choice.

gWakeOnLan scans MAC addresses on the LAN

In order to install gWakeOnLan,download the latest version of gWakeOnLan source code (currently 0.5.1), then extract it and run as follows:

tar xvf gwakeonlan_0.5.1_all.tar.gz
cd gwakeonlan-0.5.1
./gwakeonlan

Etherwake: Command line utility to perform Wake On Lan. It can be installed as follow in Ubuntu:

sudo apt-get install etherwake

To run it, simply add the MAC address of the device you want to wake up: